Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
Compared with the woes besetting our own royal family, the problems faced by the Swazi monarchy in adapting to the 21st century are minor. King Mswati III has just chosen his tenth wife. The wedding will not affect his marriage to the existing nine. There may be lessons here for Prince Charles. I have recently
This cracking book is missing something and the want is telling. Jeremy Paxman virtually discounts the possibility that people might go into politics driven by ideas or conviction. These being the spur politicians routinely claim, Paxman’s study becomes a detective hunt for ulterior motive or unacknowledged greed. ‘This fellow says he wants to make the
This is a reflection on boys and fathers. It may be different for girls. See what you think. Is ours the first generation, or the first for a long time, when boys know more than their fathers? I am not speaking of wisdom, whatever that may be. The older generation will always believe it possesses
Threatening letters on 10 Downing Street-headed notepaper are scary and I admit taking fright. My autobiography, Chance Witness, was on the verge of publication, and I was heading for the Grapes in Narrow Street for lunch with a Foreign Office friend when my mobile phone rang. Would I call my editor’s office urgently? I did.
GROUCHO Marx’s disinclination to join any club which would accept him suggests a corollary that Groucho never mentioned: the club anxious to recruit just the sort of people who would not dream of joining. The Tories may be headed that way, and if they are not they should be. For its parliamentary candidates, the principal
Until the collapse of communism, America’s experience as a great power had been of a world in which there was always (as she saw it) one great evil in the universe, committed to her total destruction. She stood for more than national self-interest; she stood, she believed (and often rightly believed), for the forces of
We had not expected a border post. This was not a border. Way over the other side of a high pass through the Carpathian Mountains lay Romania, but this small village nestling in a valley by a rushing river was in Ukraine, wholly in Ukraine, and we were anyway not taking the turning for Romania
In Manchester, a friend at university there tells me, a new word has entered smart parlance among the young. The word is ‘raped’. The expression is moderately strong, and casual. It is a way of saying that one has in some way been done over, done for, or done in. ‘I was completely raped,’ a